A couple of years ago, a friend said to me, ‘Your life is a miracle.’ I said, ‘A miracle?’ Well, you know, you tend to think of your childhood as normal well until you talk to some of your friends. Anyway, miracle or not, I’ve dedicated my life to working with people.

One day I woke up in my bed and I thought, ‘Wow! Forget about drugs, alcohol, food, sex or rock and roll. My biggest addiction is, guess what, yet my thinking. I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about — those thoughts that tell us we’re not good enough, thoughts that have been haunting us for years. I call this my stinking thinking.

Just imagine if people could hear that stink, well, here is a censored version of mine.

My stink says I need an electric shock, I took stock.

My shrink says, all Negroes are manic, I didn’t panic.

My stink says I need a rest, I felled its test.

My shrink says all Negroes are aggressive, I let him live.

My shrink said I should be grateful, I was resentful.

My shrink says I’ve got marijuana psychosis, I smoked his prognosis.

My stink says I am depressed, I was distressed.

My shrink says I belong in a gutter, I didn’t stutter.

My shrink says I shouldn’t be seen, I reminded him I am The Queen.

My stink says I’ll end up scrubbing floors, I didn’t speak any more.

Ha ha aha ha, my shrink says I need pills, I need pills, I pushed him off the hill.

The shrink in this poem represents all the people in my life who had bullied me from childhood into adulthood, from the people who raised me, who called me gruesome to the people who physically mentally sexually bullied me, to my peers who would chart in my face, ‘Walker matter, are you all white, or nigger mind, go black home and eat your koon flakes and you’ll be your white in the morning. You will, go black home and eat your sample flakes and you’ll be your white, promise!’

I was bullied so much that I began bullying myself to the extent I first tried to take my life, aged 12. Again a year later — and was lucky to survive my third attempt, aged 18. I’m one of those kids who was fostered at six weeks and placed in several foster homes. Aged four, I was placed into an orphanage; aged 11, I was sent to live with my biological mother. I was taken away by the police 18 months later. Living on the street, aged 15, picked up for shoplifting six months later, and placed in a children’s prison for 18 months.

If you had spoken to some of the adults in my life then and said, “‘That kid there one day will be the author of several books and plays, work as a bully doctor, be awarded an honorary doctorate for her lifetime achievements, they would have laughed in your face, they would have said, ‘absolutely no way’.”

‘Valerie Mason-John, that kid will end up in the gutter’ and you know what, I believe them. I believed all the negative things that people told me. I had to stop bullying myself with the thoughts in my head that told me I was useless, no good, that I was a failure, worthless, because they were keeping me in a rut. I wasn’t living, I was surviving. And if that wasn’t enough, I continued to bully myself with the chronic disease of anorexia, bulimia nervosa.

I’m lucky, some of those kids out there who were bullied by their parents or by other adults or by their siblings or by their peers aren’t here to tell their stories today, because they took their own lives, or because they died of a drug overdose. I’m telling you all of this because I don’t want to turn on my computer, or my television or a radio or open a newspaper and learn that another young person has died because of bullying, or an adult has taken their life because they were bullied in the home or the workplace. These are inconceivable deaths.